KillerPenguin has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:


I need a perl cgi for an ICQ list
It needs to gather information from a form and post it to an
HTML table
Said table needs to be sortable
Please Help!
KillerPenguin

KillerPenguin@pdark.net

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: ICQ list CGI
by btrott (Parson) on Jun 13, 2000 at 09:07 UTC
    I don't quite get what your question's getting at... but as I see it you basically need to get your data into some sort of data structure. Are you getting this data directly from an ICQ datafile, or is this just arbitrarily provided data?

    Put your data into some sort of internal structure--a hash or an array, most likely, or perpaps a hash of arrays--then use sort to sort it. Then loop through it and display it in a table, or investigate using CGI.pm to build your table.

    If you give perhaps a bit more information re: your data, we might be able to give some recommendations as to structure.

RE: ICQ list CGI
by jjhorner (Hermit) on Jun 13, 2000 at 15:42 UTC

    I, personally, could use a lot more information. For instance:

    • From your question, it seems you are going to allow people to put their info, including ICQ number, into a form, then your script will place that information into a table.
    • Are you going to have a database backend for this, or just flat files? If it is going to have relatively little data and there isn't going to be much structure, a database may end up being overkill, but you will have to decide that. Flat files have the ease use, since Perl (Pathelogically Eclectic Rubbish Lister that it is) is great at parsing text.
    • Once you have the data set up, if flat file, you will have to find a way to sort it. It looks like an array of arrays may do you well, if you aren't going to have a lot of data. Just have an array of ICQ entries, then each ICQ entry will have an array of values (ICQ number, name, location, etc). An array of hashes may also work. Each ICQ entry will be a hash of key/value pairs (ICQ_num => 6969696, name => Joe Schmucketelli, etc). Calling this last will be easy: @blah = (\%Schmucketelli,\%Schmoe, etc) and $Schmucketelli{$ICQ_num} = 6969696 , etc.
    • Sorting shouldn't be too bad once you set this up.

    I hope this helps. . .

    J. J. Horner
    Linux, Perl, Apache, Stronghold, Unix
    jhorner@knoxlug.org http://www.knoxlug.org/
    
More Information
by KillerPenguin (Initiate) on Jun 14, 2000 at 00:46 UTC

    I intend to have a input form with 5 or so elements and an output HTML table
    I am asking whether it would be better to do a db or flat file because I don't know
    Also, how would one go about storing the Form info into on single file?
    would you store each name, ICQ# and Comments entry to a variable or not?
    I am a perl newbie in the extreme and I need some help
    Thank you all for your help
    -KillerPenguin
    If you want to see what I've done so far manually then go to
    http://icchu2.cjb.net
      This was a mistake. Please delete.